A crowd gathers at Boston Common after the final suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing was arrested, Friday, April 19, 2013. / Julio Cortez, AP

by Morgan Chalfant, USATODAY

by Morgan Chalfant, USATODAY

When people discuss the Boston Marathon Bombing, they talk about April 15. They talk about backpacks and white hats and explosions. They talk about a finish line and Boylston street. I instead focus on April 19.

I was in Boston at the time of the explosions. I was at Mile 21, where the Boston College campus nestles between the Green Line of Boston's subway and the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Like many students, I was enjoying the party: the "Marathon Monday" tradition that finds most everyone outside with beer cans and smiles as they savor the day off and cheer on the runners. I watched the breaking news about the bombing from inside a crowded dorm room. Someone was still pouring Vodka shots, when another of my fellow students started crying.

We were safe in our college student bubble. What happened four days later, though, pressure cooked our emotions.

At a quarter to six in the morning on Friday, April 19, and my phone woke me up. My dad spoke: "Don't go outside. There's been a shooting at MIT and they think the marathon bombers are on the loose."

I lurched out of bed and checked all the bathrooms and all the dark spaces and all the closets in the six-person suite I shared with my roommates, just in case one of the bombers was hiding somewhere. In my defense, it was early and I was running on no caffeine.

Then, I turned on the news, sat on the couch and waited for my friends to wake up. One by one, they emerged from their beds, and I recited what I knew: "One MIT cop is dead; one of the bombers is hiding somewhere between Cambridge and the rest of the world; Most important, we're on lockdown." It seemed like practice for my budding career in journalism.

We couldn't leave the room, so we sat. We sat through the sometimes inaccurate reports about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the mangled body of his brother, Tamerlan (one ran over the other with a car when making his escape; so much for brotherly love). We watched our police force search, trying to find the kid in the white hat who dropped the backpack bomb. We clung to the image of that Watertown boat from which authorities extracted the young bomber to mark the climax of our day spent like prisoners.

I remember crying that afternoon, "He's ruining our senior year." That was so selfish of me. We lost our fun Monday holiday and a Friday of classes, while some people lost their limbs. Instead of being stressed out by whatever papers we didn't end up having to write, we worried about the 19-year-old kid toting bombs into our backyard. A college kid, like us, ruining our senior year and straining our city. We were still somewhat safe in our dorm rooms, but Boston was not.

I have memories of four Marathon Mondays, and each one stands out. The last one reeks of Jello shots and burned pancakes. It's also draped in weakness, in sadness and in rage.

But what I try to remember most about my last Marathon Monday is how strong the city of Boston emerged. I felt defenseless, especially on that April 19 in front of the television, but my city remained strong.

Morgan Chalfant, an editorial page intern at USA TODAY, graduated from Boston College in 2013.